Alwin recognized the melody with a throb that was half of pleasure, half of pain.  In the old days, Editha had sung that song.  Poor little gentle-hearted Editha!  The last time he had seen her, she had been borne past him, white and unconscious, in the arms of one of the marauding Danes.  He shook himself fiercely to drive off the memory.  Turning the corner of Helga’s booth, he came suddenly upon the singer, a slender white-robed figure leaning in the shadow of the doorway.  Sigurd still lounged under the trees, half dozing, half listening.

As the thrall stepped out of the shadow into the moonlight, the singer sprang to her feet, and the song merged into a great cry.

“My lord Alwin!”

It was Editha herself.  Running to meet him, she dropped on her knees before him and began to kiss his hands and cry over them.  “Oh, my dear lord,” she sobbed, “you are so changed!  And your hair—­your beautiful hair!  Oh, it is well that Earl Edmund and your lady mother are dead,—­it would break their hearts, as it does mine!” Forgetting her own plight, she wept bitterly over his, though he tried with every gentle word to soothe her.

It was a sad meeting; it could not be otherwise.  The memory of their last terrible parting, the bondage in which they found each other, the shameful, hopeless future that stretched before them,—­it was all full of bitterness.  When Editha went in at last, her poor little throat was bursting with sobs.  Alwin sank down on the trunk of a fallen tree and buried his head in his hands, and the first groan that his troubles had wrung from him was forced now from his brave lips.

He had forgotten Sigurd’s presence.  In their preoccupation, neither of them had noticed the young Viking watching them curiously.  Now Alwin started like a colt when a hand fell lightly on his shoulder.  “It appears to me,” came in Sigurd’s voice, “that a man should be merry when he has just found a friend.”

Alwin looked up at him with eyes full of savage despair.

“Merry!  Would you be merry, had you found Helga the drudge of an English camp?” He shook off the other’s hand with a fierce motion.

But Sigurd answering instantly, “No, I would look even blacker than you, if that were possible,” the thrall was half appeased.

The young Viking dropped down beside him, and for a while they sat in silence, staring away where the moonlit river showed between the trees.  At last Sigurd said dreamily:  “It came to my mind, while you two were talking, how unevenly the Fates deal things.  It appears, from what the maiden said, that you are the son of an English jarl who has often fought the Northmen.  Now I am the son of a Norwegian jarl who has not a few times met the English in battle.  It would have been no more unlikely than what has happened had I been the captive and you the victor.”

“That is true,” said Alwin slowly.  He did not say more, but in some odd way the idea comforted and softened him.  Neither of the young men turned his eyes from the river toward the other, yet in some way something friendly crept into their silence.